Memento Mori
by a lady of wealth and taste
Summary: "I have no interest in becoming a princess. I have no interest in becoming queen. I want to become a god." Not your ordinary Selection. When the goddess Lysha dies, ten girls are given the chance to fight for immortality, for divinity and for love. But who will be victorious? The die has been cast. Let the Selection begin. SYOC, open and accepting. 5 slots open.
1. Chapter 1

"Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,

Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels."

― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, __Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie__

* * *

Forget the throne.

Forget the crown.

I don't want to be a queen.

I want to be a __god__.

* * *

"Hmm..."

He drew the sound out like the murmurous hum of flies on a summer evening, the sound of corruption and rot and mortality approaching.

"Oh," she said, slyly, her hair shimmering beneath the dim starlight like so much liquid mercury. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees and propping up her chin lazily, her eyes the colour of coal and ash almost indistinguishable from the rest of the shadows. "You don't like it?" A single ice-blue nail tapped her cheekbone, consideringly.

"I like it well enough," said he, considering the skies as though they held all of the answers he sought - as though the constellations would rearrange themselves into the solution to the riddle she had posed to him. "I just don't understand why you do too." And that made him suspicious.

Ilargi rarely smiled but she did now, her dark skin creasing into lines as she showed her teeth and threw back her hair. "A bet isn't fun if you're certain of the result, Arvoh, my darling." She sat in a doorless, windowless, wheelless old car, her long legs stretched before her, tracing patterns in the gravel with the toe of her dori shoe, and looked up at the grey stone castle in front of her, whose spires reached to pierce the sky, impale the clouds, skewer the stars. It was been a bright, airless day but tonight it looked as though it would storm. There was a lone red light shining in the highest window of the tower, obscured intermittently by the shadows and silhouettes of beings that did not belong in any world. "You're certain," Ilargi said. "That she's going to go?"

Arvoh tore his eyes from the seas and skies to draw back one leather sleeve and glance at his watch. "Oh, I should hope so," he said. "It's about time. Seven minutes."

"Mmm," Ilargi said, and smiled, curving her shoulders towards him. "So. Do we have a wager?"

He seemed to roll the thought across his tongue, and drew his teeth across his lip. "So," he said. "If you win -"

Ilargi smiled. "Yes."

"And," Arvoh said. "If I win -"

"Yes," Ilargi said.

"Hmm..."

Ilargi stood. Her dress swirled like storm clouds, unforming and reforming into as many shapes as there were styles, as she took a step towards her old rival and stretched out her hand. "Do we have a deal?"

"I suppose," he said, with his eyes glittering the colour of distilled moonlight. "We do."

* * *

So! This is my first ever story, and I'm quite nervous - I hope you like it!

This story follows the Selection, but with a big twist - rather than competing for the love of a prince and the throne, the girls are competing for a chance to become a goddess. You heard me right!

The story takes place in the land that will one day become Illea, or perhaps it is the land that was once Illea - it's a timeless, anachronistic realm called Elinvier that blends all sorts of times, places and cultures, where there are eleven main gods worshipped, known as the Unforgotten. Each god has different followers, in different areas - some people worship all of them, others prefer one or two, others focus on only one. The eleven gods are listed below - each has different abilities, responsibilities, and stories.

But these gods are ultimately mortal - they age and die like anyone else, and a successor, a reincarnation, a new body to inhabit, must be found. When a god dies, the Selection begins - the gods scour the land for replacements to make them divine. Each of the ten surviving gods gets to pick one candidate to participate in the Selection, and gift their champion with one supernatural ability to give them an advantage.

These candidates travel to the palace, where they compete against one another to earn immortality, watched over by the royal family, who are the gods' representative on earth. Each of the royal family tends to favor a different god rather than worshipping the same, as is typical in a family, to display unity to the kingdom. The caste system remains in place here, with the high priests and priestesses of each god as Twos and ordinary local priests, priestesses, oracles and augurs as Threes or Fours, depending on the size and power of their area.

The god that has just died is Lysha, the young goddess of the hunt, tragic love, the city and the stars, and it is Lysha that the gods are seeking a replacement for. Will your character earn her status as a god?

The only problem is that this year, the trickster god Arvoh and the mercurial goddess Ilargi have got involved with a wager of their own. But what is their bet, and what will happen when it is won?

* * *

Name:

Age:

Which god were they chosen by?: (please choose three and place in order of preference in case you can't get your first choice)

What power did that god give them?: (must match up to the god)

Caste:

Occupation:

Detailed description of their appearance:

Detailed description of their personality:

Three sample dresses they might wear:

Why did they agree to take part in the Selection?:

Why were they chosen by that particular god?:

History:

Family:

Do their family worship a particular god? Which one?:

Opinion of the gods: (include reactions to a few individual gods, please)

Opinion of the Selection:

Opinion of the royal family:

Opinion of Lysha:

How do they treat the other contestants?:

How do they treat the maids? (I will create them):

Weaknesses:

Skills:

Songs that echo their character:

Sum up their character in one line:

Other:

* * *

 ** **Rules:****

1 ** **.**** No Mary Sues or flawless, perfect characters, or carbon copies of canon characters.

2\. Please be unique and diverse in your characters!

3\. Please PM your characters to me, not in a review, with the subject line of your character's name and the god that chose them. For example, if I were submitting Katniss Everdeen, I would write the PM subject line as __Lysha chooses Katniss Everdeen.__

4 _ _.__ Please, please come to me with any questions, and have fun! Your character will have much more success if you review, long and often - I love hearing your reactions and theories.

* * *

 _ _In approximate order of importance and popularity, the current gods are as follows:__

 ** **The Fade**** \- the closest thing to the king of the gods, the Fade is without shape or spectre. Unlike the other gods, the Fade is not considered a __person__ , per se, with an appearance and personality and relationship with the others. Instead, the Fade is the incarnation of balance - the personification of chaos and order. It is the deity of justice, choice, and time.

 ** **Buxiu**** \- god of healing, secrets and the harvest. He is a serious, withdrawn spirit, and is largely celebrated by those looking for balance and stability, as he represents the certainty of the seasons arriving each year despite the change they bring. Although he isn't the most popular god, he's worshipped the most widely, and people still try to keep him happy - without Buxiu, healing turns to rot and corruption, the harvest fails, and your secrets will never stay secret.

 ** **Anthe**** \- goddess of music, fire, art and rebellion. She's a wry, warm spirit, one invoked for celebrations and good fun - however, she is also one of the goddesses with the greatest capacity for wrath, and it is often said that she dances on the graves of the dead and carves her flutes and violins from their bones. She is predominantly a southern spirit, and is usually depicted with hair like blood and fire and eyes like smoke. Her song is said to conjure the dead, which is why music is so integral to celebrations of the dead in Elinvier.

 ** **Toamn -**** god of home, humour and hearth, family, fidelity and friendship, and, of course, of gifts, Toamn is probably the most popular god - he feels like coming home. Dependable, cheerful and a little bit odd at times, he knows each child in Elinvier by name as though they were his own. Like his granddaughter, Ilargi, he's always looking for entertainment, although he doesn't feel the need to meddle and interfere to find it. Toamn is celebrated at birthdays, festivals, and moments of happiness at home.

 ** **Lysha**** \- goddess of the hunt, tragic love, the stars and the city.

 ** **Himno**** \- god of creativity, imagination and craftsmanship, who is said to forge the crown of Elinvier's king or queen, write the lyrics of Anthe's anthems, and design the moon and stars each night. He is also said to sketch the face of each child born in Elinvier before they are born, thus deciding what they will look like. He's a western spirit, mostly, and seems to most belong to the wild, wind-swept coast of the north-west where he has the most worshippers.

 **Gjsard** \- god of knowledge, opportunity and wealth. He's a shy, quiet, curious spirit, and has a reputation for belonging to the 'upper classes' who are educated. However, Gsjard's control over knowledge extends to folk wisdom and common sense as well.

 ** **Ilargi**** \- goddess of bitter winter, the moon, liars, and long-lasting love. A sharp, bitter kind of a spirit who is always ready to meddle in the affairs of men to amuse herself, she's always ready to make a bet with her rival, Arvoh, if she thinks she can cheat her way into winning. More manipulative than most, and quicker to change the destiny of humans, she comes across as younger than the other deities and more impulsive. She's invoked by lovers and criminals to light their way to success. As the goddess of liars, she works closely with Buxiu.

 ** **Arvoh**** \- god of thievery, death, trickery, the ocean, and bad luck. Sly and snarky, he's always ready to gamble with Ilargi on the fate of man, although he's less likely to outright interfere - preferring instead to subtly manipulate here and there. He's the closest thing the gods have to a deity of chaos, but as the personification of one of the elements, he's vital enough that he can't be ignored, especially by fishermen who rely on him to keep them safe.

 ** **Jedan**** \- god of wandering and the dead. The most mysterious of the gods after the Fade, Jedan is the most human of the gods and is often sent to test the humans by assuming mortal form and arriving to their door to offer them riddles and tests in exchange for gifts and blessings. He is also the god who arrives to claim the souls of the dead and escort them to Yla's realm.

 ** **Yla**** \- goddess of the afterlife, memories and lost causes. She's sweeter than her job title would suggest, as she cares for those who have no one, who have lost everything. She's the least worshipped goddess of all - no one cares about lost causes, after all, and who ever remembers what they have forgotten until they have remembered it? And no one has any need of the afterlife until they are in it. She is depicted as a lesser deity, with long inky black hair, golden eyes, and a skull for a face, but she doesn't hold any grudges for it.

* * *

 _This is the central royal family, in approximate order of power:_

 **King Adam** , known as the voice of the Fade, is the king of Elinvier. He is a harsh, willful and pragmatic man who has successfully pulled his nation into isolation and self-sufficiency, avoiding all wars and conflicts for the past thirty-five years for which he has reigned, a poor father but an excellent ruler. He appears on the Report each week but does not speak or address the nation; he has a powerful and charismatic presence which suffices.

 **Queen Ora** , the high priestess of Anthe, is the queen of Elinvier. She is the third but favorite wife of King Adam, less suited to a position of authority than she is to a position of teaching and wisdom. She is thoughtful and patient, balancing out her husband's flaws, but tends also to be a little fatalistic and zealous, devoted as she is to the Unforgotten gods. She has the best singing voice in all the kingdom.

 **Crown Prince Kurban** , known as the Oracle. Next in line to the throne, he has unfortunately inherited most of his father's vices - he can be quick-tempered, callous and prideful, traits which are carefully hidden from the general populace. He is also the least fond of the gods in the royal family, a fact that they in turn acknowledge but leave unspoken.

 **Prince Mezar** , the crypt-keeper of Elinvier. He is soft-spoken and reserved, the spare to Kurban's heir, and more inclined to solitude. He has a witty, wry edge to him that sometimes pushes people away, a reluctantly gregarious and hospitable attitude, and more of an affinity with Jedan and Yla than most. He is the least favorite son of the King, who tries to love his children equally but finds Mezar's brother and sister easier to understand.

 **Princess Cabi** , known as the keeper of the keys. She is the most like her father, being an intelligent and pragmatic girl, somewhat lacking in the charisma of her two brothers but more than making up for it in capability. A little awkward around those outside the palace due to the seclusion placed upon her as the only acknowledged female heir, she is fifth in line for the throne, which seems closer than it feels, and is due to be married.

 **Lady Vracara** , augur of Lysha. She is the first, and so far only, wife of Kurban, a strong-willed and intelligent woman who promises to be as much a queen as her husband will be a king. She served as the interpreter of Lysha's will for many years prior to her marriage, a position which makes her favor very important to win in the upcoming Selection. She gets along well with her husband's family, perhaps better than she gets along with her husband.

* * *

\- With permission from the original author, Grey Aster.


	2. Chapter 2

"In the cherry blossom's shade  
there's no such thing  
as a stranger."  
― Kobayashi Issa

* * *

The royal family kept a place at the dinner table each and every day for the wanderer, complete with silverware, should he arrive to test their hospitality. When finally he did arrive, long after dinner when the stars were speckled across the sky, with his long hair somewhat in disarray and crescents of soil under his nail, they sat in silence and waited him to finish his wine before he spoke.

"Lysha is dead," Jedan said, quite simply, and one of the servants rushed forward to refill his glass. He sipped calmly, apparently ignorant of the calamitous silence which had swallowed the room following this announcement. He set down his glass, and stared for a moment at the burgundy liquid within, his dark eyes clouded with thought. "Seven hours ago."

"I..." Queen Ora's knuckles turned white on the arms of her chair, flicking an uncertain gaze to her husband, who was as though he had been carved from stone or marble; she did not think he was even breathing. "I am sorry for your loss, my lord."

"Thank you." He dabbed gently at his upper lip, obscuring for the moment the expression of sorrow that flickered across his face. "Yes, she was rather, ah, put out about it all, as you can imagine."

The heirs, as they were collectively known, ranging as they did from awkward adolescence to rash new adulthood, knew better than to speak, or to even raise their eyes from the tablecloth that covered the table, obscuring the scarred wooden surface for the eyes of the god. However, even decorum could not stop Cabi from putting a hand to her mouth as though to quell and push back the shock that threatened to swell within her throat; even that knowledge could not prevent the slight twitch in Kurban's arm as he digested this information.

"She still speaks," King Adam said darkly.

"No longer. She has entered the realm of Yla. But it was a long journey from hither to thither." Jedan folded the napkin very delicately with long fingers, matching the lines and edges precisely without looking at it. He was not the sort for jewellery, although a ring made from bone sat at the base of his thumb, the surface deeply worn and scratched. "Lots of time to talk."

Kurban turned his head slightly to look at the god with piercing grey eyes. It was indeed hard to remember that the man was a god, mortal as he appeared as he slouched slightly at the table, his head tilted as though he were listening to faraway strains of music in the distance. Kurban looked as though he were about to say something, but it was Cabi who defied the queen's quelling look and spoke: "There'll be a Selection, then."

The last Selection had belonged to Gsjard, long before Adam's time, when his grandfather had been king. The god's predecessor had specified that no scholar be chosen; knowledge did not and could not belong to the educated alone, so the candidates had been selected from amongst the lower castes, the Fives and the Sevens and all in between. Gsjard had been a Seven, hands worn weary by work. Lysha placed no such strictures upon her successors, except that they be as she had been - young women and girls, as beautiful as she. The stars in the sky, the spires of the city, and the spirit of the hunt belonged to the young and beautiful, she had said.

Adam put his hand to his forehead and nodded, the motion slow and purposeful. "Yes," he said. "Yes. The stars cannot go unattended for too long."

"It is a shame," Queen Ora said. "That our lady will not be present for the greatest hunt of all."

"It is as you say it is," Jedan said mildly, and stood, so quickly that there was a moment's uncertainty before the royal family rose as well. "No, sit, sit. I know my way to the door well enough. Your Highness - the choices shall be rendered forthwith, so that the Selection may begin. Please make the girls as welcome in your home as you have made me."

King Adam inclined his head, but remained standing. "As though it were yourself."

"It will be hard to replace one as invaluable as our dear Lysha," Jedan said. "But we shall do our best."

He bowed at the waist, an entirely incongruous gesture from a man as disheveled as he, his patched coat ragged at the hem. "Thank you, Adam, Ora." And he straightened once more. "Don't forget to lock your doors tonight. It is a cold and dark winter coming - and so few stars to illuminate the night."

As promised, he left the room alone, and left the palace alone, wind howling into the building as the ornate doors were opened and closed. It was not until the heavy door had creaked its protest closed and the boom of the locks sliding back into place had echoed through the cavernous space that King Adam slowly returned to his seat, that Queen Ora's fingers relaxed on her chair, that the heirs felt free to relax their tense spines and exchange uncertain looks - Kurban defiant, Mezar pensive, Cabi melancholy.

"To business, then," King Adam murmured. "To business."

* * *

 **Accepted characters**

 **The Fade:**

 **Buxiu:**

 **Anthe:**

 **Toamn:**

 **Himno:**

 **Gsjard:**

 **Ilargi:**

 **Arvoh:**

 **Jedan:**

 **Yla:**


	3. Chapter 3

What is she like?  
I was told—  
she is a  
melancholy soul.

She is like  
the sun to the night;  
a momentary gold.

A star when dimmed  
by dawning light;  
the flicker of  
a candle blown.

\- Lang Leav

* * *

"It's the work of a liar," Toamn said, bundling into knots the bloodied cloth that had been wrapped around Lysha's hands as she died. "I don't need to tell some of you that, I'm sure." The fire onto which he cast the cloth was fading, dancing as though to an uneven tune, somehow conspiring to make the space around it darker and to concentrate the shadows which flickered around it.

The gods assembled were dark-eyed and gaunt, as though they too had bled and died alongside the fallen Lysha. Himno's hands shook too much tonight to design the sky's constellations; Arvoh was never the most gregarious, but tonight he sat silently, his back to the stone torus which held aloft the marble pillar behind him and his forearm resting on his knees, silver winking at his fingers like something stolen. Toamn guarded the fire as might a dog and a carcass; Buxiu paced the bottom step, his brown eyes deep and dark in thought. They were as interlopers, meeting in the temple of a small mid-eastern town while its priest slept in the rotunda a dozen metres away and they were therefore for the most part silent.

"But it is, mark me - the work of a liar."

The gates of the temple swung open, buffeted by a winter gale which howled like a wounded, feral creature for a horrible moment through the eaves and arches of the space before settling and coalescing into the slender form of a young girl with hair like starlight and eyes like pitch. She spoke as though she had been present the entire time, with her eyebrow arched and a sardonic tone to her voice. "Everything is."

Arvoh smiled into his palm. His skin was still slightly blue and blackened where they had shook hands hours ago, a sweet wound like frostbite. "Bit of a nihilist streak in you tonight, snowflake?"

Ilargi moved like a girl much taller than she was, with long strides and a sway that caused ripples of firelight to shine through the individual strands of her hair. She ignored her rival's snarky register as she moved around the fire and stooped to take her grandfather's hand and kiss the bronze ring which glittered on his forefinger. "Every night, my darling. The bones of the world are decrepit."

"Any sign of him?" It was almost certain that Buxiu did not intend his voice to be quite to brusque and brisk when he spoke, but no one could blame him for sounding impatient; he still wore Lysha's blood on his fingers, on his cheekbones, in the hollow under his eye.

"The wanderer doesn't want to be found." Ilargi's voice was ice snapping underfoot. "I'll go again, but..."

The gates swung shut and locked once more, and the wind that had accompanied the goddess of bitter winter settled into complacency along with her hair and her dress again. She straightened as Toamn threw some more of the cloth on the fire. Only once she was poised against the fire once more was the longbow slung on her back apparent, the elegant shape of it incongruent and almost as tall as she. Ilargi pulled it from her back and broke the wooden weapon across her knee in a single violent gesture, tossing them onto the fire along with Lysha's death bandages, before moving clockwise around the blaze to stand between Arvoh and Himno, upon whose faces the shadows were writ large.

"He'll be fine. He'll be fine enough," Toamn said peaceably, stoking the fire in front of him with a long, slender iron poker, the end of it curled back upon itself like an old and crippled thing. "The hearth will call him home."

"Whimsy is all good and fine, Toamn, but when? We need to open and close this Selection as quickly as possible."

"Oh, I know. Until the Selection is concluded we are out of balance with the reins of the world let loose and the inherent chaos of the world may reign unchecked across the realm, yes, yes, Buxiu, I know." Toamn turned the iron poker in his hand and inspected the cinders and charcoal which painted patterns across its surface. "But an hour or seven will make no difference. Let him grieve."

"We're all _grieving_."

"It's not the same and you know it. Jedan still has strings on him. His tear ducts have yet to rust shut like ours."

Himno raised his ink-and-chalk hands to plead for peace. "And we wouldn't wish it any other way. Let us choose, and we can consult Jedan at a later date."

Arvoh flicked icy eyes towards Ilargi, whose teeth drew slowly across her lower lip as she thought pensively of the wager they had settled the previous evening. "Choose already?" Her words were husky, like she was whispering around broken glass, as though her voice were filtered through a haze of cigar smoke. "You haven't given us much time."

"Time is time. When you know, you know," Toamn counselled his granddaughter with a sly smile. "It's easy to pick a winner when you know what to look for."

Toamn had won the last few Selections, or rather, his nominations had; first choosing Gjsard, and before him Lysha, and even before her Ukhohliwe, who had lived and fallen as goddess of esoterism before the temple in which they stood had even recognized its own foundations or known the soil in which it stood. Ilargi had won the one before that, and Arvoh the one before that; the cycle went on, endless, until the threads of time had no meaning and dissipated into senselessness.

"Typically _Lysha_ , though, wasn't it," Himno said thoughtfully. "Not even she wore a skin of humility, but the strictures she placed upon us - young, and beautiful?"

"Sounds like someone's bitter that they're neither," Ilargi snapped, the cold pulling tight like an icy noose for the briefest second before Toamn dispelled it with a wave of his iron poker.

"At peace, girl," the old man said gently.

"Yeah," Ilargi said. "She is. But that doesn't mean I'll let you... pronounce these pestilent speeches against her like that."

"It's an admirable quality," Toamn conceded. "But let your loyalty lie with the living rather than the dead."

Ilargi's dark eyes were unreadable as she folded her arms and stretched her long legs, looking more like some kind of spidery marionette suspended on the strings of something in the sky than a living, breathing girl. Arvoh was a mere glimmer of ice-blue eyes and pale skin beside her, less fully formed than a shadow. "Whose temple is this?"

"Mine," Buxiu replied mildly. Although he wore a brown jacket open over a snow-white shirt and a gold chain, a wolf-skin slung across his shoulders, his shadow wore something considerably longer, a forked smoking jacket and a hat over his cork-screw curls. He had his hands in his pockets, and sunlight staining his hair despite the gloom of half-night.

A half-smile. "You know what I mean, Bu."

"Aye. Cedar Valennon."

"And has Cedar Valennon a daughter?"

"Not anymore," Arvoh said softly, and Ilargi made a face.

"Then, alas! my search continues." She kicked away from the wall, stirring snowflakes like so many cherry blossom petals as she moved, and crossed through the fire as though it were not even there. "Don't forget to douse the fires tonight, boys. It is a cold and dark winter coming - and so few stars to illuminate the night." Ilargi's hair spun in an invisible wind as she turned, flicked her hand at Arvoh in a characteristically bitter gesture, and exploded into a cataclysm of grey moths the colour of dirty snow. They spun and fell in the wind for a few moments before disintegrating into fragments of ash in the space where she had stood, and with a slight smirk, Arvoh plucked one of their charcoal wings from his hair and crushed it between the tips of his fingers.

"Lovely girl, your granddaughter."

Toamn grinned, his white teeth stark and bright against his creased brown skin and his long, braided black hair. "She's a treasure."

Buxiu did not bother to hide his wry smile as he moved across the courtyard in Ilargi's wake, yanking the wolf-skin from his shoulders and throwing it into the fire to a puff of smoke. He shot the others significant looks, but did not slow his pace. "Seven days, then. And watch yourselves." As he walked, the threads of his form unraveling until he was a faded ghost, silhouetted against the wall, and then he was gone. Without a goodbye, as was his custom. Himno had pulled a smoldering branch from the fire and was tracing a map into the snow, scorching the spiral symbols into the snow with faraway eyes, and Toamn drew the cloak at his shoulders tighter around his shoulders as he stoked the coals again.

"Go, Arvoh," he told the younger god. "The grosbeak's right - dark and cold is to come. And if you have made a wager with the girl, fool that you are, you'll need all the time you have."

"You know about the wager?"

"I know that she hasn't forgiven you for the last loss, or the dozen before that, or the hundred that proceeded it."

"It _almost_ seems as though she keeps a grudge." Arvoh fixed his eyes on the golden light that filled and swallowed the window pane of the tower behind the temple, a stone construction that shouldn't have lain harmoniously with the rest of the marble architecture - the elegant columns and wide arches and straight, clean lines. It was a space that suited Buxiu, he thought - severe.

"She gets a taste for things."

Like immortality? Arvoh could still remember Ilargi's Selection. There had never been any doubt - no other had stood a chance against such a storm. Her eyes had been brown then - a pale, tawny kind of a brown, close to gold. Afterwards, they had turned stygian, like ink had been poured into them, like a rot had taken over them from within.

In Arvoh's mind, Ilargi still had gold eyes.

"As do you," the old man noted. "And yet, you have yet to make your choice. I would have believed your selection obvious."

"No," Arvoh said. "I've learnt my mistakes, old man, and I've watched our brothers and sisters make theirs. The obvious choice... would have been the wrong one. But you. You have a candidate in mind."

Toamn's eyes widened. "Something like that."

"And Lysha? Her murderer?"

"Liars are like snakes." Toamn bared his teeth in the smile that followed. "They'll hide and slip through the shadows, quiet as you please, but eventually... you'll hear them rattling."


	4. Chapter 4

"And now it's time. To use vague holy-man speech, like: I am

another face in your hand, the face of your eye — wing-surrogates, the word

 _bones_ —

it's time for _afternoon_ , them white-blank architectures.

No, veil. Nothing. It's time

for you to forgive me: I was forced to eat valises

that wouldn't close by themselves —

that was just a dream, good morning:

regurgitate the stars and the soot."

― Ana Bozicevic, _A Kind of Headless Guilt Emerges_

* * *

The sky - dark.

No stars tonight, and the forests fell silent.

By morning, the people of Elinvier knew for certain.

There were few left alive who remembered the last death of a god, when Ukhohliwe had drowned in the soil below the manumission bell on the northernmost edge of the world. But if there was one thing the people of this realm knew, it was rituals of death and how best to mourn.

Rather than stars, the night was lit by the bonfires struck in every village and every town, on every farm and every mountain. Even here, high on the mountain, the light reached and soaked into the heather and macchia, honey-gold and darting as a snake's tongue, and the smog hung and choked, thick like a noose, dense like treacle, and from it was wrought a woman, soft as the smoke from which she claimed her shape, her hair and lips as red as the fire that had birthed her. Anthe was music in a form that was half-human; she wore songsheets as her rustling skirt and violin strings banded about her biceps as might a warrior woman wear her steel brassard, her wild red hair twitching like a living thing threatening to take dance.

"I thought I might find you here," she said. She had a lower voice than most would think to expect - when the villagers found musical girls to portray her in their plays and rituals down in the mundane world of humanity, they had sweet voices, voices like an ajaeng, like a piccolo balalaika, like a dulcet tinwhistle. No, Anthe sounded as though she had torn her vocal chords from her throat as a child and replaced them with bits of broken glass, a husky voice tired from smoke, from late nights, from singing notes beyond her natural capacity. But there was poetry behind her voice - poetry could be revelation, revolution, but in this moment it was comfort and nostalgia, swans and leaves and moths and apples sweetening in the dark. "The edge of the world."

"If only."

Jedan didn't quite turn his head towards her and when Anthe tilted her head it was obvious that the smoke was eroding her, the pale edges of her skin indistinguishable from the clouds of incense that billowed behind them and eclipsed the mountains; she was not quite concrete, not quite tenable, and the paint-chipped hand that she extended towards her old kinsman was translucent and barely-there.

"Oh," she said. "We'll cut your strings yet, wanderer."

He did not speak, and Anthe released her grip on the world, whatever little bit of energy she had expended to keeping herself whole and humanly shaped, and was lost to the wind once more, buffeted about the flowers and the trees, a flash of bronze where her violin strings had been. And then, just as Ilargi forced herself from the storm, Anthe came forth from the smoke once more - this time, directly in front of the wandering god, forcing him to take a step back and to meet the diminutive goddess's clever russet eyes.

She flicked a glance over her shoulder, and saw upon what he gazed - not the horizon, but a small village at its edge, nestled between cliff and precipice, spider lilies sprouting along the paths towards a graveyard more populated than the town which served as its patron. "A choice made, have you?"

"Have you?"

"I'm decisive." Anthe smiled. "Decisive as... a drumbeat. Amaterasu. Her name means _shining over heaven_ , and you know that names are poetry distilled into sparse syllables."

He knew.

"And the others?"

"Oh, Arvoh always has his eyes on _someone,_ and Buxiu likes to waste no time."

Jedan's gaze was thoughtful, and he directed it once more towards the rough-hewn edge of the cliff. "Can you remember your Selection?"

"Hardly at all. It is as smoke in my memories - the more you grasp, the more it _twists_ and turns and escapes. But I am old. I am ancient." Anthe seemed to enjoy that thought, of being ancient, of being unknowable, of wearing bones that had belonged to the ground centuries and centuries ago, of wearing a skin that should have been gathering dust. "I remember hers, though."

"Lysha's?"

"Mmm. I didn't think she'd do it, you know. I had my money on that other girl, the tall one, green-eyed..."

"The Fade's. Meregidi."

"Meregidi the tracker. I don't know. I never thought that you had the eye for godhood, Jedan, and I won't apologise for thinking so. I didn't think that you would win your Selection and I didn't think that your candidate would win hers and yet..."

And yet Lysha had chased the stars from sunrise to sunset for aeons, and worn the moonlight in her hair like a silver brooch, and hunted animals that had no right to exist by worldly laws, and died only hours ago though she had been born before any human alive on earth had drawn their first breath.

"Yes," Jedan said. "She was a darkhorse."

"And Yla will ensure she is cared for below the earth." Anthe shrugged. The songsheets whispered a rhyme to the sky. Around her pale arms and throat, words folded and unfolded themselves in black ink, flitting, fleeting glimpses of poetry and prayers composed and wiped clean within a single instant. "The others are waiting for you, Jedan. They'll cut your heartstrings, if I'm not kind enough to."

"I'll be glad of it."

"And you'll make your choice?"

"My girl won the last time. I intend to ensure she wins again."

"What use has the wanderer for the wilds?"

Jedan turned his brown eyes - human, Anthe thought, they were human, warm and _mundane_ and not-kind but not-cruel, merely and utterly human - to meet hers. And he met hers, and wondered if she knew who had murdered Lysha. If she knew where the poison lay, what intent had lain behind it, what exactly Jedan would do to the throat of the perpetrator should he by chance lay hands upon it. He wondered these things, but allowed none of them his voice. He half-thought he had no voice to give it life. "None at all. But I trust my own intentions more than any other's - including yours."

"None taken," Anthe said, and quirked a red, red smile. "Oh, do me a favour, Jedan. Choose your girl and then follow the smoke. Drink and dance and sing awhile. You're well able to mask yourself - and there are plenty of pretty ladies and handsome men burning flowers in the villages tonight. Funerals are for the living, and we so rarely take the opportunity to _live._ "

"Go and I shall follow," was the wry reply, and with those words Anthe was stolen by the smoke once more, a faint tinge of red writhing and wreathing across the mountaintops, leaving behind the haze of heat and the scent of autumn crocus and meadow saffron hanging in the cold evening air.

* * *

 **Closing date for submissions is _next Wednesday_ , 19th April 2017. If you have reserved a place, please do not forget to submit or to PM me giving up your place! Sorry for the delay...**


	5. Chapter 5

"When they had finished they made me take notes of whatever conversation they had quoted  
So that I might have the exact words, and got up to go, and when I asked them  
Where they were going and  
What they were doing and  
By what names I should call them ―  
They would tell me nothing, except that they had been commanded  
To travel over the world continually, and upon foot and at night,  
That they might live close to the stones and the trees  
And at the hours when the immortals are awake."

― W.B. Yeats

* * *

The sun had melted to a stripe of copper and the sky was deepening blue when the aerialist made her appearance. She was hooded, her sable hair hidden beneath an indigo tagelmust, her eyes cast downwards, but she was not the kind of girl that you could look away from for anything less than an apocalypse. Gules-damask ribbons laced about her wrists, tight as a noose, a sabretache hung at her belt alongside her sabre. The girl who called herself Ekaitza Neska Hezur said the sword had been her grandmother's, but then she also said she came from a family of assassins—or else a family of acrobats, or maybe she was the lost heir to Elinvier, depending on her mood—so it was hard to know what to believe.

The market spilled across the city centre. It was hard to be glum in such a place, even with the knowledge of the goddess Lysha's death weighing upon the souls of those assembled. In some _derbs_ , as the wending alleyways were called, the world seemed draped in carpets. In others, freshly dyed silks dripped scarlet and cobalt on the heads of passersby. Languages crowded the air like exotic birds: the lowland dialect, the northern accents, the tribal tongues. Women chivvied children home to bed, and old men in tarboosh caps leaned together in doorways, smoking _haxixa_. A trill of laughter, the scent of cinnamon and donkeys, and color, everywhere color.

The aerialist made her way toward the streets to the square that was the city's nerve center, a mad, teeming carnival of humanity: snake charmers and dancers, dusty barefoot boys, pickpockets, hapless tourists, and food stalls selling everything from orange juice to roasted sheep's heads.

None of these attractions, exotic and esoteric as they were, could compete with Ekaitza Neska Hezur the silkjinn, of course.

She drew the eye and she drew the crowd and by the time she had reached the square, where the sky was blotted out by the towering, slightly ragged buildings that aimed unerringly for the sky on every side, she was as the piper leading the rats to their slaughter. All terracotta and spires and narrow apartment buildings pressed together; tourists crowded the square, but natives crowded the balconies, like vultures watching carrion.

And despite that, they lost her. It didn't seem feasible - when all eyes followed her, when faces turned towards her like sunflowers spin towards the sky, when she made herself a _spectacle_ as she was. But she vanished into the crowd, a ghost dissipating, a tantalizing bleed of shadow at the edge of sight, and then for an instant—one gliding misstep that brought her clearly into view - a girl with eyes like jewels and stars. Then, gone. And yet all spectators who had trailed her paused and waited and faced the empty space at the very heart of hearts of the city. It was the precise geographical centre of the city, where (rumour had it) a murdered god lay beneath the concrete, his hair growing, growing, growing despite his dead blood lying heavy in his veins.

The city was known as _Hiriburua,_ a name plain enough to be hardly a name at all. Neska's people had always called it _Villananzanj_ , in that lilt-and-keen half-dead language of the kasbahs and the wastes. And before that it had been, quite simply, the silken city, and the reason for that was quite elemental, and quite beautiful - the city had no sky. Not any sky that could be seen from the ground, that is; between every window on every floor of every building, ribbons stretched from one finial to another, slender, ravelled, frayed where generations had darted their way across from one spire to another, from rooftop to rooftop like illicit thieves with stars in their pockets.

It was an old tradition, one which harkened from the days in the wastelands when singular points of colour were the only bits of beauty in the world. The nomads - Neska's people - had brought the custom into the cities when the cities were born, and they practised it still; the ribbons formed a spider's web and impenetrable lattice of silk upon the horizon.

And it was from those ribbons that Ekaitza Neska Hezur, the silkjinn, fell like a shot, like an angel from the heavens with wings ripped away, shedding blood and feathers.

She spiralled in her fall, her hair flying even as she dropped, the jewel-toned fabrics of her clothing streaming and pulling at the air as though attempting in vain to slow her descent. It seemed inevitable that she would meet the ground, quite painfully, quite permanently, but then she swung, fingertips grazing the cobblestones, and the slender lapis lazuli ribbon anchoring her to the unapproachable splendor of the empyrean. It broke, of course, as all threads do, and for a moment Neska was airborne before she caught another of the hanging silks and arced upwards again, flipping backwards as though the mortal elements of _gravity_ had no claim on her, could have no claim on her, not for as long as she lived and drew breath.

Most of the crowd were too enthralled to applaud, although some sparse cheers erupted every time it looked like Neska was moving a little bit too close to the ground, like there might still be a chance to see bruises and blood and bone yet. The two most invested watchers, and yet the two least fearful for the silkjinn, observed from the balcony of the Huntress' Fane, a limestone and red-brick building with spires that extended almost high enough to scrape the undercarriage of the heavens. There was a black wrought-iron balcony running the perimeter of the platform, and the slender, slightly translucent figure of a young girl balanced lightly on the rail, looking back over her shoulder to watch the silkjinn fly. Leaning against the balustrade beside her, his brown skin very warm and his curls reflecting bronze and gold in the light, Buxiu watched the crowd rather than the girl.

"She suits you well enough," he said, almost reluctantly, as though the words had been torn from him.

"Well," Ilargi replied, her starlight hair blinding. Her dress moved gently in a nonexistent breeze, undulating like a cloud into as many shapes as there were styles. "Well enough."

She nudged the older god with the edge of her dari shoe - for Buxiu was her elder, both in time spent immortal and the appearance of his vessel's human skin.

"You are distrait, Bu."

"I am. I confess myself concerned with the others. A murderer among our ranks."

"I know who I suspect."

"As do I."

A significant look passed between the two. Ilargi was patron of liars, while Buxiu claimed all the secrets of Elinvier for his own, and between the two of them there was little illicit that passed unknown in the world.

"Furthermore," he said after a moment. "I do believe grief has driven Anthe to the edge. She appears _non compos mentis_."

Ilargi paused, and made a face, and shook her head. "That doesn't sound like Anthe." In the pale white light of the eastern sun, Ilargi was a ghost without colour, looking distinctly ill at ease with washed-out colours, her eyes closer to grey than their true deep, stygian hue. She rarely ventured this far from the frozen wastelands she commanded at the edge of Elinvier, to the very northern edge of the world. Certainly she never stayed for long. Buxiu wondered if that aggrieved her - had she been a northern girl prior to her Selection? "That would require her to have some semblance of a heart with which to grieve."

"Her candidate." Buxiu turned the inkpot over in his hands, his dark eyes assessing. "She's _demented_."

"She'll fit right in, then."

"Murderous, even."

"Oh, _you_ can't exactly condemn her for that, can you?"

"Hush, my passerine. This is something else altogether."

So Anthe had chosen and Ilargi had chosen and Jedan had chosen and Gjsard had chosen, and the world was narrowing inch by rotten inch. Nearly half of the Selected had been identified, even if they did not yet realise it.

On the ground below, Neska moved like she was performing an ancient dance, reciting a memorised poem - lowering her hand in a graceful gesture to gently brush her fingertips across the hilt of her sabre before selecting a knife instead and drawing it, moving it in a serpentine shape in front of her so that it captured the dying light as reflected it back towards the sky. Ilargi broke the silence a second time.

"Grandfather has chosen. A priestess' daughter, of course."

There was a dark delight in Ilargi's voice that made Buxiu squint at her with suspicion clouding his watchful eyes.

"Something special about this priestess' daughter?"

Ilargi's lip curled. "Nothing at all."

"Nothing at all," Buxiu echoed, a hint of mirth colouring his voice.

"Nothing at all," she answered him again, and below them the assembled crowds broke into sparse applause as Neska moved from the sky to knives to fire, more a wraith than a girl. "She's good, isn't she?"

"Are you _really_ looking for validation, little rabid one?"

She considered this for a second, her tar- black eyes reflecting the mid-noon light like so many radiant stars, her argent hair wild in wisps. "I'm not sure," she said distantly, and flicked her coal-black eyelashes towards the earth as Neska vanished as abruptly as she had appeared. "I'm the indecisive sort."

She fractured, as only a goddess could, and it was easy - she was already etiolated, her colour drained wan by an unfamiliar heat and light that could not exist in her northern home, so it was easy for her to crack and to vanish as dramatically as she typically did. Her skin flaked away, becoming white-hoar feathers which became white-gold grosbeaks and pygmy falcons, and her hair became silver silk like that which hung, flower-like, from the spires and the balconies. Her eyes fell as beetles and her teeth, white and sharp, melted into snowflakes and ice which fluttered down onto the heart of the city below. If the crowds assembled wondered where the snow had materialised from, they did not bother to look upwards; it wouldn't have mattered if they had, because Buxiu was a shadow and the eastern sun was unforgiving, utterly, to shadows.

* * *

In the garden of Jedan there existed a gargantuan tree, old, its canopies dripping star-shaped leaves. Gold, green, tipped in stark white. It was heavy with a crop of yasakmeyve fruits on the cusp of maturity and independence from the bough. Arvoh had seen many such trees on his travels, but never one of such sheer size; they didn't grow just anywhere, resisted every vain attempt at concerted cultivation. Only at the liminal edges did they flourish, where another, more ethereal world hovered and seeped into city, black loam making sludge of asphalt, green radiance splattering traffic signs and sidewalks. Where birds flew too close to that border they disappeared, the dirt-crusted pigeons and smoke-stained crows.

Accordingly there were no birds here or butterflies, no ants or amphibians. All was clean. Not a blade of grass was too long; no weeds or infestation of fungi touched the earth, no mark of worm or insect hunger on petals. Frangipani, lotuses—either Jedan favored those, or no other flower would grow. Symbols of passing on and peace, respectively. Appropriate, perhaps.

Myth and legend told that yasakmeyve fruits were alluring and sweetly scented. Reality was less glamorous. Their scent was faintly vegetal rather than like palm sugar, jasmines, or some heavenly blossom. On the ground one of them lay fallen and premature, ivory skin bruised from impact and seeping blue sap. Arvoh turned it in his palm, tracing the contours of a pareidolic face in the bruised surface - rough, a work in progress, but there was already a nose and mouth defined, eye sockets deepening. The ones on the bough were shaped similarly. All yasakmeyve fruits from the same tree looked alike, replicated over and over in some internal mold, the way dolls emerge as identical strangers from a factory.

These were the western islands, wild and damp, thoroughly discouraging of any life or light, and yet the tree flourished. The garden was small, high-walled and cramped, and utterly ironic - that the mortals and the devout should put down roots for a god who was determined to do the precise opposite, attempt to contain him even through metaphor within high walls and four foot by four foot patches of soil.

Really, Gjsard had claimed this place for his own. The branches dripped with paper folded into delicate origami shapes, stars and snowflakes hanging from every bough like cherry blossoms. Arvoh stepped forward and plucked one - out of curiosity or malice, he could not quite say. Unfolding it revealed a splintered fragment of a recipe, or was it a broken snippet of poetry? Knowing Gsjard, it could be either, or both, and truth be told his writing remained so cramped, sharp-edged and scrawled that the meaning was impossible to divine. Was it even English?

"Is it yourself, or is it the other?"

Gjsard retained his lower-class accent, despite his godhood. There was always some little remnant of who they had once been, even if it was a frayed and ragged and pale facsimile of what humanity they had possessed. It faded over time - Gjsard had evanesced swifter than the others. Toamn blamed it on his isolation. Himno was of the opinion that the sage was just weaker than the rest.

"As much myself as I ever am."

Behind the tree, crumbling stone steps led in a tight curlicue to the tops of the garden walls, and then beyond into the narrow stone round-tower which rose as the highest and sharpest point of the skyline along the western coast, which was crowded in the main by cottages and farmhouses and low stone barns. "The Pavilion of Thought waiting for you in the lowlands and you choose to sequester yourself in ostracism here?"

That was the grandiose name for the ballroom beneath the palace that now housed the library of the high priest of Gjsard. It was a sight to be sure: shelves rose forty feet under an astonishing painted ceiling, and the spines of books glowed in jewel-toned leather, their gold leaf shining in the glavelight like animal eyes. The glaves themselves were perfect polished spheres, hanging by the hundreds and emitting a purer white light than Arvoh had ever seen from the rough, ruddy stones that lit the western shores.

"The Fade slinks low," Gjsard said, his broad accent making it into a threat. "There is no _thought_."

"You've been too long isolated."

"And _you_ don't sound like Arvoh."

The space was dark, but not ominously so; merely a careless kind of shadow, the gloom of recklessly disregarding mortal matters such as _light_. Occasionally there would be a fulguration of light, a flash akin to that of lightning, and Gjsard's outline would become visible, shuffling dog-eared papers and scrawling with a long-plumed owl feather, quickly and carelessly enough that Arvoh thought it unlikely it would be legible at all the next morning.

"It's done," the deceitful god said, putting his frost-bitten hands into his pockets - as much as he had hands, as much as he had pockets. It was all hard light, a matter of tricking the mortal eye. Did any of them really have a body? If they did, it was not human and it was probably not pretty. "She agreed. You have your Selected."

Gsjard returned the quill to the inkpot, and, dipping gently, began to trace again. "Her name is Lilth."

"Penillion, to be sure."

"And yours?"

"I have yet to choose." Arvoh stooped to pick up a discarded book; not Gjsard's, although all knowledge was his. This wasn't really a _book_ , but a diary, maybe, a set of notes, blue ink on yellow paper. Curled writing. Wild dots on the i's.

"But your choice is obvious."

" _Obvious_ won't win me the wager."

"Nothing will."

Arvoh turned the diary over in his hands. A man who was not a god may have felt ill at ease, dressed as he was in the kind of mortal garb that suggested propriety and decorum, a waistcoat and a shirt whiter than Ilargi's hair, shoes blacker than ink, but Arvoh, though he appeared out of place, rarely knew the discomfort of an awkward situation, even here. Gjsard still, after all these years, dressed as a farmer or a fisherman, a shepherd or a smith, a labourer, perhaps. He still had callouses and keloids on his hands. He still wore his hair shaved clean, as though with a straight razor. He still squinted slightly, as though facing the sun, and wore his shirts rolled to the elbow.

"Is that a prophecy or mere cynicism?"

"You want a prophecy, ask for a prophecy."

"No," Arvoh said measuredly. "There are so few mysteries left in the world. Let us preserve the future."

"As you wish. Where dwells the Fade?"

"In a golden crown. He prefers Adam, as well you know. And - " Arvoh cut Gjsard off before he could speak. "The rest are assembled and scattered and waiting. It doesn't matter, does it? It can't matter. That is not why I'm here. You know of the wager, so you also know that I am in need of... _abetters._ Buxiu and Toamn will not turn against Ilargi for such a petty matter, and Jedan is too much in nighted colour -"

"And Anthe favours you not, and Himno does not choose sides and the Fade wants nothing more than to see you fail and fall."

"Just so."

"Well, I shall join Himno in his neutrality. You should know I have nothing to offer you, anyway. You want secrets, chase Buxiu. You want lies - well." Gjsard did not look up at all. The nib of his pen moved across the paper as something possessed. "Chase storms if you want a liar. But you're here, so you want facts, plain and simple."

"I'm willing," Arvoh said, a hint of dark mirth in his voice. "To haggle."

"I'll give you one for free." Gjsard drew quick, violent slashes through what he had written, and glanced up from his page for the first time. His right eye, swallowed by the white film of blindness, his left eye the brightest and most brilliant blue, and both of them piercing. "What was her name - you know the one, the flower girl..."

Arvoh addressed his gaze to the rafters. "I know not."

"It's a wonder you and the passerine don't get along better. Liars, the both of you." Gjsard shrugged, and stood. "Well, you'll learn it soon enough. Toamn has Selected her. Valennon, is it not? The priestess' daughter."

"Toamn did this?" The expression that flitted across Arvoh's icy eyes was closer to anger than unhappiness, something bitter like cyanide seeping into his voice, and yet Gjsard could not tell if he was displeased with Toamn, with Ilargi who had no doubt machinated this decision, with the girl herself for being Selected or with Gjsard himself for informing him. Arvoh was not an easily read figure.

"Correct." Gjsard, unlike many of his immortal brothers and sisters, smiled often and smiled broadly - the kind of expression that could cleave the sky open end to end, so sudden and coruscant. "I suppose I might choose a side after all. There's always such wondrous _trouble_ when you two fight."

"There'll be no fighting. Ilargi has no concept of subtlety. She believes us to be playing chess, with man as pawn, with moves to be made and plays to be played. She is incorrect, as ever she is." Arvoh glanced at the sage. "You changed your mind quick enough."

"It occurred to me that I have neglected my duties. I know all. I must. And yet I do not. So I should."

"You speak of Lysha?"

"Of her death."

"Yes, yes." Arvoh's smile was not a friendly expression. It had teeth. "Why, I had nearly forgotten."

* * *

 **The Selected**

Anthe: Amaterasu Min

Ilargi: Ekaitza Neska Hezur

Toamn: Annora Valennon

Gjsard: Lilth Rose

Jedan: Marzanna Petrova

 _If I have not yet got back to you, my apologies! It does not mean your character is rejected, only that I am still working my way through the backlog. I shall endeavour to do this as soon as possible. I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and please do review and leave your thoughts! The first Selected are going to be introduced in the upcoming chapters, so the plot will then begin to progress._


	6. Chapter 6

"Don't be ashamed to weep;  
'tis right to grieve.  
Tears are only water,  
And flowers,  
And trees,  
And fruit,  
Cannot grow without water.  
But there must be sunlight also.  
A wounded heart will heal in time,  
And when it does,  
The memory and love of our lost ones is sealed  
Inside to comfort us."

― Brian Jacques

* * *

Toamn called every hearth home. It was his right and his domain, in that ethereal way that one could lay claim to a divine duty as _property_ , his in a way that could little be expressed in any human tongue. So his entrance to the Valennon tower was not, in his mind, any kind of a trespass against rights but merely a homecoming, the arrival of a long-wandering soul. He found his way into the tower as his granddaughter might, the press and pull at every crack in the wall, the gap between window and frame, but where Ilargi was a bitter winter's wind, Toamn was all the warmth in the universe, leaching through the brick to coalesce into human form in front of the fire, one moment a slight haze of heat not entirely justified by the pitiful spitting of coals in the grate and the next his human shape, bent-backed and bow-legged.

The poor Valennon girl knew little what to make of the stranger when she spotted him, of course.

What a surprise it must be, Toamn thought, for rapunzels rarely expected casual visitors in their seclusion - especially when that visitor had set up a loom before the fire and brewed two mugs of sweet-smelling tea in the sparse time it had taken the Valennon girl to glance briefly towards the window.

"Ah, my little anemone," the dark-skinned god murmured when he felt her surprised - _frightened_ \- eyes upon him. "Worry not. I am not the wanderer." He gestured the girl closer, and rewarded her with a smile when she did so. "Your time will not come for a while yet - at least, I have heard nothing from my compatriots to indicate otherwise."

The wheel in front of him spun on, the threads vanishing from his weathered hands as it did so, and Toamn indicated the chair in front of him. "Won't you...?"

She sat. He had known she might. The fire liked her - it bathed her generously in gold and amber, and Toamn was surprised little by what that light revealed.

She was beautiful, of course. Toamn had expected as much from any girl who would draw the clever eye of Arvoh. Her skin was sard, her lips plumb, her long hair dark mahoghany. And that smile, oh, that _smile,_ hesitant though it was, gave off all the warmth of a thousand hearths. It was a smile that felt like coming home, Toamn thought, and regardless of the rest - Ilargi and her machinations, Arvoh and his skulduggery, Lysha and the murder which lay at the heart of the pantheon - Toamn rather thought that he would always have chosen Annora anyway.

Annora's eyes - wide, rich, brown - searched Toamn's stoic visage for any indication of his motives. She recognised him, of course; a priest's daughter would.

Not many of the other gods made house calls, of course. Other girls would awaken after dreams, would be singled out by their local priest or oracle, would be given signs and signal and sigils in the most ancient habits of the gods. But Toamn had always liked the personal touch. He had always liked to sit in the home of his Selected, look them in the eye, speak to them as though he were their own grandfather and they were discussing something as mundane as the weather.

Toamn smiled peacably. "Won't you drink?"

The scent emitted by the teacup at her arm was fragrant, bouquets of wildflowers distilled into a few mouthfuls of sweet liquid, their perfume drifting gently across the room as Annora hesitantly lifted the cup. With a god sitting opposite you, it would be all but impossible to deny such a direct request, although there were of course those old maid's tales of what occurred to the poor souls who ate of a god's food or drink.

But this was Toamn. There were no such stories about Toamn. Spite was more his granddaughter's hobby.

"I thank you," she said, and Toamn batted the words away as might another a moth.

"Ah! for what? It is only tea, little oxeye, and hardly worth thanks."

He took a sip of his own cup, as though to settle her nerves and reassure her that no venom lurked within its pale recesses, and returned his attention to his spinning, the loom twisting with a speed and ferocity more suited to brutal business. "I know," he said softly, not looking away from the threads in his hands. "How poorly these past days have treated you."

The Valennon girl's fingers curled tightly around her cup. "Oh," she said. "That's life, isn't it?" Her brown eyes remained on Toamn. "I've suffered worse before. I suppose I will again." She took a careful sip from her cup, and her eyes fluttered shut at the sheer sensation of serenity and calm that overtook her nerves the second the tea touched the tip of her tongue. It was unlike anything she had ever felt - with one exception, she thought, but the effect of the tea and its fragrant aroma was such that she could not even muster much hurt or pain as she considered that matter. It tasted, she thought, of a certain future, of freedom in a beautiful world, of reciprocated love. "Gods willing," she said, as an afterthought. "I will suffer so again. It is part of being human."

"It is," Toamn agreed. "We do not suffer so."

She eyed him cautiously.

"I wonder then," Toamn said, and watched the threads sway. "Why you would plead so ardently a place in the Selection if you... value your humanity so. It is not," he added, "a weakness. But it is an oddity."

"He told you..."

"He told me nothing. I know every child in this kingdom as though they were my own, and that means I know your heartaches too." He twisted the threads in his hands, enjoying the way they writhed to correct themselves as he did so, and shrugged lightly. "The broad strokes of them, at the very very least."

"I believe in humanity," the girl said softly. The firelight rippled on her hair like so much sunlight. "In mortality." There was, Toamn thought, steel behind her silk, strength behind the sweet charm she presented to the world. "In our capability for... great things."

" _But_." Toamn said. "There is a _but_ harboured on your tongue, and they tend to bite when caged."

" _But_ ," the girl said softly. "My sentiments are not shared by... by all."

"By your father."

He had, after all, locked her away. Imprisoned her in a tower, far from the sky and far from the god she had so... admired? Loved, even?

"Divine supremacy is his guiding principle."

Toamn smiled. "I don't disagree."

The girl showed a hint of unhappiness at that - a curled lip, her eyes sharp, and yet she knew, Toamn knew that she knew, that Toamn was offering her something she could only have dreamed of, something Arvoh had denied her, something she craved more than anything else, and not even her humanist tendencies permitted her to argue with such a benevolent genie.

"And your guiding principle," Toamn continued. "The... hunger, isn't it? Overwhelming, for love, for approval."

Her eyes met his. He liked that. Toamn liked that a lot.

"You know why I am here," Toamn said.

"I do," she said. It was a mere breath, the suggestion of the word in the warm air.

"Then allow me to do this by rights. Annora Valennon, I appoint thee my vassal and thrall. Be thou deiform in thine own right - the sublunary is lost to you. Arise a crusader, in the most ancient Selection, in the empire of the empyrean, in the name of King Adam."

And it was so.

* * *

There came days when choices had to be made.

There came days when the choices were made and consequences had to be dealt with.

This was the odd nature of the duties of the god, when the choices were taken away from you. Jedan wasn't used to that. His was a tiresome job, one with little scope for compromise or mercy. He accompanied the souls of the dead to Yla; he did not kill them, could not sway the time or circumstances of their death. He was a messenger, the wanderer was, merely a bad omen.

And yet when he had arrived to the coast all those months ago, maybe a little more than a year ago, Jedan had wanted more than anything to be able to make a choice.

Two little children sat by the water, a boy with piercing blues eyes with an arm around a tiny red-haired girl. They clung to one another, as the drowning might cling to whatever detritus they could find on the surface of the water. Their clothes dripped briny water, but never grew any drier; their hair hung in bedraggled strands around pale faces, but did not stir in the wind. And they were sightless, utterly blind and staring without comprehension across the dark surface of the water, their expressions unchanging, their fingers frozen knotted in the fabric of one another's coats.

The choppy gray surface of the water stirred and Arvoh rose from its depths, carrying a girl in his arms. "You took your time," he said, noting Jedan's still presence on the bank. Dressed as he was in sturdy boots, a tired flannel shirt, threadbare jeans, Jedan could have been any weary traveller paused on the road for a moment by the ocean; he was unremarkable, indistinguishable from a mortal. The same could not be said for his compatriot - Arvoh's wet hair dried even as it settled around his pale face. "There was a fire," he said. "In the east. A hundred souls to lead home."

Arvoh said nothing, but set the drowned girl down at the side of the water. Jedan stepped towards her and knelt, and was surprised when, at the merest touch of his fingers, the drowned girl gasped a breath and began to shake with the cold.

"A survivor," Jedan murmured. "Not entirely part of the plan."

He looked sharply at Arvoh. Arvoh appointed the dead, Jedan accompanied them, and Yla sheltered them, so where an ought-to-be-dead girl became a not-entirely-dead girl, Jedan was right to look to his shadow-wrought compatriot for an answer.

"Not entirely," Arvoh said softly, malignantly. "My choice."

Jedan's gaze did not waver. It was utterly resolute. "If you persist in using mortals as play-things -"

"She lives, does she not?" Arvoh gestured to the drowned girl, whose curly brown hair, threaded with aureate highlights, splayed around her head like a lopsided halo. "Is that not a kind of mercy? Question not the motives but the ramifications."

"You spared her," Jedan said darkly. "Can you not spare the children?"

"I cannot." Arvoh cocked his head, and in that moment Jedan saw that despite his protestations to the contrary, long years with Ilargi had rubbed off on him for sure - it was such an Ilargi expression, that movement of the head, that narrowing of the eyes, that for a moment Jedan was tempted to reach out and rip his skin away, certain that Ilargi's black eyes would wink at him from beneath. "It is their time."

Their Time.

"It is her time also."

"No."

"You changed the rules for _one_ and not the others -"

"The times," Arvoh said. "They change. It was her time, and now it is not. The children are dead already, Jedan. Unformed souls are lost quickly."

Jedan set his jaw. "I cannot convince you otherwise."

"I doubt it."

Jedan touched the drowned girl's hair again, very lightly. Arvoh was silent beside him as the girl's lids fluttered open, revealing pellucid blue eyes the colour of hydrangea. In that moment, looking in her eyes, the god of wanderers could perceive much - her passion, her independence, her generosity, her loyalty, her kindness, her deep capacity for love. It was a concise snapshot of a human being which could nevertheless hardly dream of capturing every element of a girl with only half a life lived.

She moved her lips as though to speak, but could express nothing until Jedan said, not unkindly, "What is your name?"

"Marzanna," the girl said in the voice of one who is still trapped beneath the water, in mind and soul if not in body. "Petrova."

"Marzanna." Jedan stroked a few damp strands out of the teenager's pale face. "Sleep dreamlessly in the name of Yla."

There was movement by the water, he could see now, some local men dredging the water to pull up a body identical to the one Jedan knelt beside, Marzanna's doppelganger identical in all aspects, from the wet curlicues of hair sticking to the nape of her neck to the bruises along her cheekbones and chin. Not her doppelganger - her corporeal self, distinct from the soul Jedan knelt beside.

The soul's eyes fluttered closed and sank into the soil. The local men began to shout for help as the body in their arms awoke abruptly. Even from this distance, Jedan could hear Marzanna calling for her brother and sister.

They could not hear her. They were gone, half-way between the two worlds. It was Jedan's duty to bring them the rest of the way.

He held out his hands to them, and the children, trusting, took them without question, as though he was the only thing in this world to which they were not blind. It was near enough the truth. Jedan took their cold, dead hands and turned towards the path. Arvoh, silent, turned back towards the ocean to disappear in his own way. There was something hard and bitter under Jedan's ribs where his heart had one been, something that eased only minutely when he looked towards the horizon and caught sight of the first stars flickering into light high above as Lysha went about her usual duty of igniting the skies. There was something lovely, he thought, about the world going on even as little children died and young women drowned and the path to the underworld was treaded again and again and again.

There came days when choices had to be made.

And one year later, after Jedan had walked that same path with Lysha for the very last time, and the time came to make a very important choice for a very important Selection, Jedan knew a name and he knew a face and he knew that if he wanted to choose a worthy candidate then Marzanna Petrova might be his best option.

* * *

 **Hi, everyone! I really am so sorry for the long delay to this story, and I totally understand if people have lost interest! Unfortunately I was hospitalised for a long time last May and then started university so I was absolutely drowned with work and didn't get any chance to get any writing done! However, I am dedicated to seeing this story through. If anyone has any concerns or thoughts about their OCs, the story direction, or the writing quality, then please drop me a review or PM ASAP!**

 **Here we will see two more Selection girls introduced. The applications are still open for a little while, but nearly all slots have been filled! Please do review if you like or don't like the chapter, they are what motivate me and what really inspired me to come back to this story.**


	7. Chapter 7

"Oh, the road, the road  
All you who sing the praises of dust and bones,  
Places that she takes us, the choice was ours -  
We wanted much more than our fathers  
While our mothers said their prayers."

― Brian Fallon

* * *

Ekaitza Neska Hezur's grandfather still spoke with awed reverence about the moment he saw a god die.

"I thought it was a falling star," he would say, very softly. His voice was brimstone and granite, hoarse from a life's overuse of _haxixa_ and strained like a string played too many times. It was not the most beautiful voice, but it was almost hypnotic in its persuasive, addictive quality. Those who heard one word stayed to hear a second, and then a third, and then, almost before they knew what was happening, they had been drawn into the story like a rockling on a ribbon. The rhythm of his accented voice belonged to that lilt-and-keen half-dead language of the kasbahs and the wastes, and though it was not a song he was spinning, the captivation was much the same.

And oh, was the old man a performer when he wanted to be. His eyes would widen minutely, and he would raise a hand to point to the sky, as though to trace the route the dead god's corpse had taken along the horizon, his gaze lost to the past. "He fell from the sky like his wings had been ripped from him, shedding feathers and sparks in his wake, flames swallowing him whole as he tumbled..." And for a brief, blissful, beautiful moment, he would appear totally lost to the here and now, and the audience would permit themselves to get lost in the memory as well, and for a moment there would be silence, even here in the heart of Villananzanj _._

"I have never seen anything so beautiful," he would add, and that was Ekaitza's cue to start picking pockets.

 _Thaelab solas ematen zaukanean ari, gogo emak tkvens shvilebs,_ she thought. _While the fox is chatting to you, keep an eye on your children._

If there was one thing the old man knew how to do faultlessly, she thought, it was how to distract _mausebi._

He wasn't her real grandfather, of course, though most people tended to think all nomads looked enough alike that the lie was softly spoken and easily believed. They shared the same sable hair and sard skin, hands worn to callouses by a lifetime spent gripping ropes and toiling the land. They even had the same way of telling mistruths, eyes narrowing as though squinting into the sun, and hands hanging loosely by their sides. She had worked with him over seven winters as a younger girl, when the ribbons of the sky grew treacherous with verglas and even the girl who would become the silkjinn shied from the dire dives her older self would relish. She had never known a time when the fall was not a part of her as inextricable as her lungs or her liver, but it was difficult to attract _mausebi_ to the marketplace in the cold dark of December and when the time came for Ekaitza Neska Hezur to make a fatal miscalculation, she would rather it was in front of as many watching eyes as possible.

They did so relish the prospect of broken bones and brimmed blood, the _mausebi._ Ekaitza could not remember ever learning what that word meant - it was easy to imagine that she had been born knowing it, just as she had always known that she was _tximeleta_ , which was its opposite. It separated the _us_ from _them_ , the mice on the ground from the butterflies in the air. It was, she thought, a nice word for marks. For targets. For rubes, if she was being honest. But it had another, subtler meaning. It was a child treading water out of their depth, a boy afraid of heights stepping out onto a ribbon, a man who could not speak the language haggling at a stall, a character in a play ignorant of the fact his death was imminent because the script had decreed it so. It was someone who did not know what had happened, what was happening, what was to happen.

And waking up in the palace of Elinvier, very far away from the comforting chaos of Villananzanj, Ekaitza could not help but feel like she had found her place among the _mausebi._

There was a mark on the back of her hand, she saw, formed of a set of shallow, narrow wounds accompanied with the dull throb of pain that told her they were freshly inflicted. It was almost elegant in its barbarity, she thought, a kind of artistry in its appearance, sort of beautiful if she allowed herself to forget the wince of pain that accompanied each curl of her fingers. It was the shape of an eye, she saw now, shaped almost like one of the _hamsa_ _s_ that would be sold in the marketplace of Villananzanj as an amulet against evil. It was all overlapping lines and curves, its curled red edges stark against her dark skin. Was this, she wondered, a mark of the god who had chosen her, or a mark possessed by all of the Selection?

Because she had no doubt that she had been drafted into the Selection.

It had been a lie, of course. That story about the dead god. There had been not a single bit of truth to it. A beautiful lie beautifully told, which Ekaitza didn't imagine constituted a lie at all, if you stopped to think about it. But the last dead god had been long before Ekaitza's time. The last Selection had been long before her time.

She couldn't say she knew what to expect.

Even as she sat up in the unfamiliar bed, noting absently that she was still clad in her usual uniform of hood-and-ribbons-and-boots, Ekaitza could not help but reach for a sabre which was no longer there. Her pockets were empty, the daggers she hid in her boots spirited away. Not even the needles she used to keep her hair bound back in the worst of the heat had vanished. Without her edges and her sharp points, Ekaitza felt like the ribbon anchoring her to the empyrean had just been abruptly cut. She was in freefall now. The Selection? She had never wanted to be a part of the Selection.

What use had Ekaitza Neska Hezur for the gods? What use had the gods for Ekaitza Neska Hezur?

She ached for the familiar cool of knives in her hands.

 _Arrotz-herri, otso-herri_ , she thought grimly.

 _A foreign land is a land of wolves._

* * *

"Hello?"

Marzanna Petrova had never been so glad to hear a single word spoken. It hung plaintively in the air like an orphaned note of song, but it was the first sign of another human being that Marzanna had glimpsed or heard in the long few minutes that had passed since she had awoken in a strange room, in what felt like a very strange building, what felt like very far away from home. The crest of the royal family was everywhere; if Marzanna had not acutely guessed as much, it would have been obvious with a few looks around exactly where she was.

She hadn't been sure if she had dreamed the visit of the wanderer. No, that wasn't right - she knew she had only dreamed it, but she had not been certain if it was a figment of her mind or the true divine voice of a god whispering to her in her sleep. The clarity and precision of the vision could not be denied, of course; Marzanna herself did not think she was capable of dreaming such vivid colours, such beautiful images. And Jedan's voice had been indescribable, a strange lost music drawn through time from ancient ages long past.

He had given her a choice. Marzanna had always been very fond of _choosing_.

And now here she was. She had awoken from the dream slowly, rising to consciousness as though through water, and found herself lying fully-dressed in a bed that was not her own, made up with silk sheets and velvet throws in rich, deep, dark browns and purples. Jedan's sort of colours, she thought absently, and she had looked around the room and had seen that the entire room was so decorated, with the kind of traditional hard-wood furniture that characterised the western reaches of the kingdom. Jedan tended not to have temples like the other deities did, hewn in marble and wrought in gold - he spent too much time on the road for such vanity - so his followers often erected roadside shrines to the travelling god, fashioned from whatever ribbons and wood and granite they could spare. There was such a shrine on the balcony of the room, the little scraps of white fabric attached to the top-most strut fluttering in an invisible breeze like a flag waving in surrender. Marzanna had gone to the glass door of the balcony, and found it locked.

She felt trapped. Marzanna had never been very fond of having choices taken from her.

"Anyone?" The other girl spoke again, her voice sweet, and this time Marzanna was able to follow it around the corner to find the girl who had spoken it. She was, as Marzanna had expected her to be, quite beautiful - gods tended to like beauty, the old stories always said, and this girl was gorgeous enough that a girl less confident than Marzanna might have felt a little self-conscious standing next to her. Her skin was sienna and pale umber, her hair taupe and kobicha, her eyes the deepest, richest chocolate brown that Marzanna could remember glimpsing. She was tall and slim and dressed in the garb of a girl from the midlands, albeit a wealthy one at that - long, layered fabrics in floral colours, a veritable bouquet of cloth that brought to mind the swathes of material with which temples of Arvoh tended to be draped to create an atmosphere of secrecy, albeit in much brighter shades. The silver pendant of a rose, hung on a slender chain, glittered lazily from around her throat. Not unlike Marzanna's own style of dress, although of course Marzanna tended towards much more muted tones. Nonetheless, it was clear that this girl came from a similar background: higher caste, midlands, more educated than not. Tattoos snaked her arms, disappearing under the short sleeves of her dress. It was impossible to see how much of her skin was taken up with them. Somehow, that comforted Marzanna. It was a foolish thought, but she had been half-convinced she might have been the only member of the Selected so marked with ink.

Clearly she and this girl shared some similarities. Certainly, she looked almost as relieved to see Marzanna as Marzanna felt to glimpse her.

"I was beginning to think I might be all alone in the world," she said, with a slight smile, and Marzanna noted that even her smile was bright.

"I'm always happy to prove someone wrong," Marzanna replied, and extended a hand to the other girl, because it seemed a polite thing to do. As she did so, she noticed for the first time the ring that had appeared on her thumb, out of nowhere. She had never seen such a piece of jewellery before, though she could not deny it was strangely beautiful in its simplicity: not quite perfectly round, hewn slightly misshapenly, and made of a slightly rough, grey material that she realised after a moment was bone. A gift from Jedan? She didn't have time to wonder. "Marzanna."

"Annora," was the reply, and the two girls shook hands. Annora's wrist was bound in a circlet of string, Marzanna noted, a tight woven bracelet fraying slightly as though plaited in a rush, each thread a subtly different shade of red. It was so entirely incongruous with the rest of the girl's elegant mien that Marzanna guessed it was something of an analogue to the bone ring that now sat between knuckles on Marzanna's right hand. Annora caught Marzanna looking, and nodded, almost shyly.

"A gift," she said simply.

"From your god?"

Something flitted across her eyes at those words, something Marzanna did not have time to decipher, for Annora simply shook her head demurely and said, "I've concluded as much."

There was a silence, which stretched for a long moment, as though both girls were waiting for the other to sacrifice the name of the god that had selected them to accept eternity, and unwilling to speak until the other had. And then, as the quiet threatened to swallow them whole, both girls seemed to realise the folly of this particular stratagem - Marzanna doubted very much it was meant to be a secret, and even if it was, it wasn't a secret she was particularly interested in keeping. She raised her hand and wiggled her thumb. "I guess that means this is from Jedan," she said wryly.

Annora looked appreciative, and seemed to understand immediately. "Toamn," she replied, pronouncing the word precisely with a shyness that suggested she was slightly out of practise with such casual conversation, especially one executed in regard to something as momentous as the Selection. And then, with a hint of self-deprecation that made Marzanna think they might get along, she added, "The Fade alone knows why. I'm hardly the hearth-side type."

"What need have gods for reasons?" These words belonged to a stranger, and Marzanna and Annora turned in concert to see who the voice belonged to. The girl who approached could have been formed of pure distilled sunlight, so bright and warm seemed her strawberry-blonde hair, so smooth and golden her skin, so bright and clear her cerulean eyes. She was shorter than the others, but slender, with the tiniest waist Marzanna had ever seen. Her nose and cheekbones were spattered with freckles, as though scattered there with an artful throw. Another beautiful girl to add to the gods' selected collection. She moved with some degree of confidence, which seemed to falter slightly as she drew closer to Marzanna and Annora.

"I'm sure they didn't pull our names out of hats," Marzanna replied, her tone more brusque than not. The newcomer was dressed like a girl from the coast - her pale dress was more like a chemise, so light the shift and so sparse the fabric. And she was barefoot, Marzanna saw, her legs and arms bare and unblemished, her hair still slightly damp at the roots as though she had walked here from the ocean without stopping to dress. "I'm sure there's some rhyme or reason to our Selection."

"I wouldn't presume to wonder," the other girl replied, and then offered Marzanna a sweet half-smile. "My name is Dej."As she moved her head to greet each girl, the wan light of the corridor glinted off the pale silver necklace that was her only apparent accessory, a long thin chain upon which the pendant of a lotus hung loosely, spinning lazily in the hollow of her throat. Annora seemed almost transfixed by the sheen of the necklace, her gaze hardly moving from it as Dej spoke. "It's lovely to meet you two."

Marzanna nodded. "Yes," she agreed shortly, and glanced between her two new companions. "Any sign of the others?"

It was just beginning to sink in that this was really, truly, the beginning of the Selection. Eternity yawned abruptly before her, wide and unknown and unknowable, and the idea of meeting the other girls that were meant to become gods suddenly unnerved her more than she could ever articulate. Only one of them could ascend to the level of godhood, and yet here three of them stood, blood and bone and breath, ageing and and withering and dying a little with every moment that passed, mortal and human.

Three of them, and if Marzanna was to be blunt, not a single special thing shared between them. They were _human_.

Dej gestured. "I think there's four of us on this corridor," she said, "at least, there's four rooms... but the other one is empty."

That seemed to distract Annora from the necklace. She arched an eyebrow, but said nothing for a long moment, until the moment Dej seemed tempted to speak again: "I can hear voices."

And so she could, and so Marzanna could, if she strained a little, if she really listened. Muffled, she noted, and stepping further down the corridor she saw that the hall in which the three girls stood was only a little alcove, and if one took a few steps further along the space abruptly opened up into a large landing circled by golden railings, which overlooked a wide, airy anteroom. A beautiful gold-and-sapphire chandelier overhung the entire scene, which Marzanna saw now consisted of a small group of girls - another three members of the Selected, she thought, clustered tightly together as she and Annora and Dej had been, though seeming not quite as friendly towards one another, looking at the walls and the ceilings and the busts that lined the space rather than at their companions.

"After you," were Annora's soft, wry words, and, laughing lightly under her breath, Marzanna did as she was told. Dej trailed behind them, her eyes darting about wildly to take everything in, as the three girls descended the wide marble steps to join the others. Each must have been taken as she was, Marzanna thought, because here was a girl dressed as though to perform with the visage of a skull painted upon her face and a lace fan hanging from her fingers, and here was a girl with little flecks of clay still clinging to her skirts and to her fingertips with dancing shoes still on her feet, and here was a girl with dark eye-shadow and kohl smeared around sightless eyes, as though only just awoken from sleep. They made a motley group, Marzanna thought, and all the stranger when Marzanna and the others joined them, for she realised that except for their ages and the beauty of the features, she could not imagine that they shared a single quality between them.

Could there be a goddess among their number? Someone worthy of the title... the power?

"Six," Dej said softly. "Where are the other four?"

Annora seemed on the threshold of speech when a wooden door under the stairs, quite ordinary in appearance, suddenly swung open and a man stepped through. He was dressed quite simply, although to Marzanna's eyes his wealth was obvious in the fine quality of the shirt and shoes, the glint of gold at his cuffs, and the way he carried himself as he walked towards the assembled group of girls. "Good evening, ladies. May I extend our warmest welcome, on behalf of my family, our household, and all of Elinvier."

He stopped about five feet away from the girls, and Marzanna abruptly recognised the worn, weary features of the king. _The king_ _._ She almost wouldn't have known him, without his usual garb of furs and silks and crown. The man that stood in front of her could easily have been one of her father's colleagues, war-worn and whiskey-wearied. Certainly, he did not smile.

"It is meet that you have arrived so soon," he added, and gestured to the door through which he had just appeared. "Dinner is fresh served, and your fellows approach. Allow me to show you to the dining hall, so that you may get to know one another before They come."

No one had to ask who _they_ were, but it was only the blind girl who was bold enough to ask a question when none had been courted. "You mean to say the gods themselves will be present tonight?"

To his credit, Marzanna thought, Adam took this interruption in stride when most men of his position might have rankled. "That is not mine to say," he said simply.

"When shall we have occasion to meet them?"

A note of irritation this time. "That is not mine to say."

The blind girl seemed poised to speak once more, but was quelled by the girl with the skull makeup beside her, who silenced her with a light touch on her arm, the warning apparent.

Marzanna seemed the next bravest among them. She curtsied to the king as neatly as she could, the old etiquette lessons that had been half-forgotten making a reappearance when they mattered most. "Your majesty," she said simply. "We would be honoured to dine with you this evening. We thank you."

He inclined his head. "No thanks is necessary," he replied simply, and gestured to the door. "Please, allow me to follow."

Dej moved forward with a quickness, hooking her fingers around the elbow of the girl with the dancing shoes, and giving her a quick look that said _forgive my impudence_. She was easily forgiven; they moved forward as a single unit, and then the girl with the skull makeup and the blind girl followed them, going two by two like something for a myth. Marzanna glanced to Annora, but her words died on her lips when she saw where the other midlands girl had trained her gaze.

For standing at the balcony overlooking the antechamber, leaning his forearms on the golden railing, looking for the briefest moment like an ordinary stranger glancing casually down, was a man with dark skin and curly hair and - "Buxiu," Annora breathed, barely a whisper - and the unmistakeable golden-eyed gaze of a god.

* * *

 **That has to be some kind of a record for slow updating - I'm really sorry if anyone has lost interest in this story, or believed it was abandoned! Updates are gonna be slow for the next few weeks, and then I hope to get into a routine of weekly updates. My deepest apologies again for my long absence.**

 **Obviously I would love to hear what you thought of this chapter, whether I am accurately portraying your characters and what you want to see happen next. I have included a list of the characters which appeared in this chapter, as not all of them was named - if they were mentioned earlier in the story, or if it was stated which god was selecting them, I have also included that information.**

 **I hope you enjoyed reading! Please read and review.**

 **Much love xoxo**

* * *

 **In this chapter (in order of appearance)  
** Ekaitza Neska Hezur, selected by Ilargi  
Marzanna Petrova, selected by Jedan  
Annora Valennon, selected by Toamn  
Dej Salajane  
Andromeda Nalick  
María Kurukafa  
Amaterasu Min, selected by Anthe


End file.
